The Beginning Of Sorrows

On the 6th of March 1904, just six months after Arnold's journey to
Russia, a special meeting of the Inner Circle of the Terrorists took
place in the Council-chamber, at the house on Clapham Common.

Although it was only attended by twelve persons all told, and those men
and women whose names were unknown outside the circle of their own
Society and the records of the Russian police, it was the most momentous
conference that had taken place in the history of the world since the
council of war that Abdurrhaman the Moslem had held with his chieftains
eleven hundred and seventy-two years before, and, by taking their
advice, spared the remnants of Christendom from the sword of Islam.

Then the fate of the world hung in the balance of a council of war, and
the supremacy of the Cross or the Crescent depended, humanly speaking,
upon the decision of a dozen warriors. Now the fate of the civilisation
that was made possible by that decision, lay at the mercy of a handful
of outlaws and exiles who had laboriously brought to perfection the
secret schemes of a single man.

The work of the Terrorists was finally complete. Under the whole fabric
of Society lay the mines which a single spark would now explode, and
above this slumbering volcano the earth was trembling with the tread of
millions of armed men, divided into huge hostile camps, and only waiting
until Diplomacy had finished its work in the dark, and gave the long
awaited signal of inevitable and universal war.

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To-night that spark was to be shaken from the torch of Revolution, and
to-morrow the first of the mines would explode. After that, if the
course to be determined on by the Terrorist Council failed to arrive at
the results which it was designed to reach, the armies of Europe would
fight their way through the greatest war that the world had ever seen,
the Fates would once more decide in favour of the strongest battalions,
the fittest would triumph, and a new era of military despotism would
begin--perhaps neither much better nor much worse than the one it
would succeed.

If, on the other hand, the plans of the Terrorists were successfully
worked out to their logical conclusion, it would not be war only, but
utter destruction that Society would have to face. And then with
dissolution would come anarchy. The thrones of the world would be
overthrown, the fabric of Society would be dissolved, commerce would
come to an end, the structure that it had taken twenty centuries of the
discipline of war and the patient toil of peace to build up, would
crumble into ruins in a few short months, and then--well, after that
no man could tell what would befall the remains of the human race that
had survived the deluge. The means of destruction were at hand, and they
would be used without mercy, but for the rest no man could speak.